Emmanuelle - the novel

 

Swinging Thailand

Emmanuelle
By Emmanuelle Arsan
Translated by Lowell Bair
Harper Perrenial
ISBN 9780007300402

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and suitably condemned. 

Marryat Rollett-Andruane was a Thai-French woman who, in 1956, married a French diplomat called Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane. They settled in Thailand and their hedonistic lifestyle apparently gave birth to the swinger scene in that country. She was also an actress (and allegedly director), which I’ll probably get into in a later review but, under another name, she stars with Steve McQueen in the movie The Sand Pebbles (and quite possibly had him as one of the notches on her belt.. or below it at least). In 1959 she allegedly wrote and, certainly had published (originally anonymously), a novel apparently based on her real life sexual encounters called Emmanuelle. My understanding is that the book was banned and the publisher did some jail time for it (not sure where I read that as I can’t find that info now but I’m pretty sure that’s what I read and now I’ve read the actual novel I can better understand why that might have happened… yeah, I’ll get to that later).

In the late 60s the book was unbanned and published under her pen name Emmanuelle Arsan but, it’s alleged that her husband actually wrote the book. Personally I think this might have been a collaborative work because of the way the book is paced and, there’s also some evidence recently to suggest that may be the truth of the matter… yeah, I’ll ge to that pacing issue soon enough. 

Now I wanted to read this before I embarked on Severin’s small set of the white Emmanuelle films but, I really didn’t know what I was letting myself in for here. It wasn’t the explicit erotic elements that gave me pause for thought here… I’m all for that. Nope, it was another big element of the book which seemingly permeates the majority of the attitudes of the characters which both surprised me and made me wonder why this book is a) still published and b) hailed as an erotic masterpiece. Yeah, I’ll get to that element soon because I’m torn right now about wanting to call the book out for what it also is and... the idea that doing that might in some way endanger the publication of this blog. I’ll need to word this carefully at first… I think.

Okay, so the first impression I had as I started the tale, which tells of the French diplomat’s wife going to stay with him in Thailand and embarking on a polymorphous sexual journey (ha, I’m already being diplomatic with my wording) was that it’s full of sex. More than I’d expected… at first. Including the opening sex on a plane which I believe starts off the movie version and which I know starts off the movie Black Emanuelle (with one M to evade copyright problems… reviews will eventually be coming of that strand of films, is the plan). 

Now, some reviewers have called the book badly written but I disagree. I think it’s very well written and has a nice, almost poetic turn of phrase about it. For instance, rather than say such and such character laughed at her question, the book phrases it thusly… “This question let her discover Bee’s laugh!” And things like a woman’s sexual regions might be referred to as, say, her Astrakhan triangle. And the quality of the written sex is also pretty well done for erotica. I recently read a much lauded piece of erotic source for another review coming soon at some point here and the text was absolutely terribly written (cough… Behind The Green Door… cough) and this book is like Dickens compared to that stuff. A blow job, as given in the first half of the book, is rendered beautifully with words, for example. So I was actually fairly impressed by the writing. Although, since it’s translated from the French, one has to wonder if the skill of the writing lies in the original written word or the translator… something I’m sure I’ll never know.

Okay… then the book takes a turn for the worse. The sex disappears and a character called Mario enters the story. And then we get maybe 60 or more pages of unbelievably boring and terrible philosophy on the nature of eroticism. To say it’s dull would be an understatement. It’s stops the book stone cold and leaves it to die. It’s why I believe that maybe it was a husband and wife collaboration… with one writing the first half and one writing the other half.  It’s also at this point that you kind of realise how easily malleable and changeable the lead character’s mental outlook is. She seems somewhat fickle to the point of instability as each new sexual encounter… most of them open ended and not resolved in this particular text... takes place.

Now then, I’m calling this book out now because… well... I was surprised that a lot of the sexual encounters and discussions in the book take place within the company of minors. Underage sex is happening here and, though the victims of this are not portrayed as such, usually dominating and instigating some of the sexual content, it’s quite unsettling and makes me question the legality of the book (and makes me wonder just how far the film must deviate from the source to be allowed a cinema release… I guess I’ll find out soon). But, yeah, while it’s not all the book it certainly is an underlying part of the tale and it does not shy away from scenes of sexuality involving, well, youngsters. I’m astonished this book has been hailed as a classic and I’m just not sure what’s going on here… nor why the majority of the short snippet reviews on Amazon I quickly scanned to see if other people were calling it out, rarely mention this insidious aspect of the book, if at all. 

And that’s me done with the first Emmanuelle book, I think. While the book is quite engaging for the most part and offers surrealistic imagery such as an orchard of wooden penises hanging from the trees… the other stuff I mentioned in the last paragraph is a real deal breaker and I’d find it hard to recommend this thing to anybody. Now I have to see what’s happening in the movie version, I guess. I’m sure that element must have been stripped out of the tale, such as it is (more a series of episodic encounters than a tale, truth be told). 

Seven Samurai

Village Of The Doomed

Seven Samurai
aka Shichinin no samurai 
Directed by Akira Kurosawa 
Japan 1954
Toho/BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers.

“Find hungry samurai. Even bears leave the forest when they’re hungry.”
Seven Samurai

What can one say when talking about Seven Samurai? 

The film was made by my favourite director, Akira Kurosawa, around the same time that both Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, starring Toshiro Mifune (my second favourite all time actor) and Godzilla, starring Takashi Shimura (my all time favourite actor) were also being filmed. This film stars both these actors in the leading roles (I seem to remember they were friends and next door neighbours for a time, too). All three films were expected to sink Toho studios without trace so, with Kurosawa filming for an unexpected 148 days and with costs going four times over the projected budget, you can understand why production was shut down a number of times. Kurosawa’s alleged response was to just go off fishing, figuring that the studio had already spent so much money, they wouldn’t want to pull the plug. 

However, all three of those films have stood the test of time and ended up saving Toho Studios and securing its future as the number one Japanese studio of all time. Japanese critics at that time were somewhat soured on the film, claiming it to be too Westernised. Kurosawa, while freely admitting that he was somewhat influenced by the cinema of John Ford, made something that took in a lot of money in Japan, regardless of these criticisms. And of course, many films (including Westerns) have been remakes of Kurosawa films... in terms of Seven Samurai, my favourite two remakes would be The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond The Stars (reviewed by me here).

The story is well known and it consists of bandits threatening to raid and pillage a village, once the barley has ripened and been harvested... with a small bunch of the poor farmers journeying to a town to try and hire a number of samurai to protect them when this occurs, although all they can offer is three meals a day. Seven are acquired and, by the end of the three and a half hour picture, only three are left standing... and one of them stays to join the farming community, pursuing a local girl.

The film starts off brilliantly and, after about a quarter of an hour of the farmers being taunted and jeered at in town (and after, I think, we get a very brief glimpse of future Kurosawa regular and acting giant  Tatsuya Nakadai playing... and I quote the IMDB... ‘samurai wandering through town’), we finally meet three of the main characters. The lead, played by Takashi Shimura, has been hired to kill a thief holding a local baby hostage, holed up in a barn. In a scene which must have ben absolutely electrifying to Japanese audiences at the time (let alone the characters of the town people watching him do it) he slices off his top knott (something unheard of for a samurai, even a ronin such as that which Shimura plays) and shaves his head to look like a priest. Then, with a clever ruse utilising two balls of rice, he makes short work of the thief who we see only in aftermath, in slow motion, as he rushes out of the barn and then falls to the floor. 

Now I can’t write a whole book about this movie for one blog entry (although some people have... you should maybe read one) but even this scene gives a look at the genius of Kurosawa (apart from the dynamic use of slow motion and editing which is used more than once in the movie). And I'm talking about the way he puts people who will become important a little later in the film into the audience’s mind by stealth. For instance, the character of ‘the kid’,  Isao Kimura, walks in behind a group of six watchers in the 4:3 frame behind them (making a group of seven, not the last time this number of characters in a frame crop up in the film) and when they all leave to follow the action, he stays in frame for a few seconds, which embeds him into the audience consciousness when, a few minutes later, he turns out to be one of the leads. 

And not only that... the next shot where he walks behind a bunch of onlookers watching the show from behind, with the camera now looking at the scene from behind him, Toshiro Mifune’s character is sitting on the floor in the shot too. It’s all good stuff and is just another sign that Kurosawa was an absolute master of his art. As is his use of verticals to compartmentalise a frame a while later, in a believable way while still conforming to the small, almost square frame of the aspect ratio. It’s great stuff.

And the drama between all the characters is absolutely amazing... even though my two favourite characters in the film played by two other Kurosawa regulars... Minoru Chiaki and  Seiji Miyaguchi... are both dead by the end of the story. There are also some of the greatest action sequences in movie history, with frenetic editing, fury and sound, especially the final battle where everyone is slipping around and drenched in rain and mud. It’s a film which truly sticks in the mind, not least because of  Fumio Hayasaka’s phenomenal score (I even like the song version of the main samurai theme, not used in the movie but which is in one of the discs in the first of the Kurosawa soundtrack box sets put out in Japan some decades ago) which livens things up when it needs to and which also, in one particular theme, seems almost the inspiration for Elmer Bernstein’s bandit theme from the remake known as The Magnificent Seven.

Another thing I like about the movie, a concept sadly lost nowadays, mostly, is that there is respect for the older people in the village. When the villagers are stuck and don’t know what to do, they go and see the village elder and listen and take note of his wisdom... a nice thing to see. 

Decades ago, a friend and I went to see a day long bunch of seminars about Kurosawa at the National Film Theatre, followed by one of the movies (I think it may have been The Hidden Fortress). Among the guests were Kurosawa’s friend and biographer, the late, great Donald Richie and, also, the great director Alex Cox. Cox had a bunch of postcards representing all of Kurosawa’s films and he asked the audience to vote on whether each film was a ‘masterpiece’ or not, implying that this is a good way to tell the worth of a film director. In the case of this experiment, there were well over half of the director’s films which were argued by various members of the public as being masterpieces... which really says something about how well appreciated this director is. And, of course, nobody hesitated in proclaiming Seven Samurai a masterpiece. If you’ve not seen this one, maybe sort out that oversight sometime. One of the most entertaining films in the history of cinema, for sure.

Loki Season 2

Loki Cokey

Loki Season 2
USA 2023
Marvel/Disney
6 episodes 

Okay, so I’ve finally caught up with Loki Series Two and the good news is... it’s markedly better than the first series. It might be because all of the episodes here are directed by the great Benson and Moorhead but, given the absolute state of Disney’s Marvel TV shows (not to mention the Star Wars franchise they’re also currently ruining), it counts for a lot, I think, that this follow up series is any good at all.

Once again, this one stars Tom Hiddleston, reprising his role as the multiversal variant of Loki who split off from the regular timeline in Avengers Endgame (reviewed here) and, also returning are most of his co-stars. These include the brilliant Sophia Di Martini as a female variant Loki, Owen Wilson as Mobius, Wunmi Musaku and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and... Jonathan Majors as ‘the big bad’. We also have a new regular, the delightful time scientist OB (aka Ourouboris) played by legendary actor Ke Huy Quan… aka a grown up Short Round from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, who also won an Oscar last year for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (reviewed here).

Now, if you remember my review of the first series of Loki (reviewed here), you will remember I said it had one weakness which was to introduce or re-enforce Jonathan Majors (from Ant-Man And The Wasp - Quantumania, reviewed here) as the ultimate threat to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and so all the episodes seemed ultimately to play second fiddle to that idea. And the post credits on one of the Marvel movies featuring that actor along with Loki and Mobius, I forget which one now, dovetails into an episode here.

Well, there’s a similar weak point here. Now that Majors has been found guilty of spousal abuse and effectively cancelled, it’s pretty clear that he can no longer go on to be the future lead villain of what, I assume would be, a future Avengers movie. So, although Majors is in this a lot, mostly playing a much nicer template variant named after the original comics company that became Marvel… Timely… this series is very much involved in a single story arc to eradicate him as the big bad of the future, effectively writing him out of any future Marvel movies and TV projects. So the whole of the series pretty much just serves this resolution… albeit in the most twisted way imaginable.

That being said, it’s certainly a very fun and fast paced series despite, like the first one, not having many action sequences… even less I would say. But it doesn’t matter because it’s lightning fast and though a lot of it is expository dialogue, most of which I didn’t understand a word of by the final episode, it never gets dull and the performances of the high calibre actors involved certainly carries it. Also, although I clearly should have watched this before going to see Deadpool And Wolverine (reviewed here), it didn’t really matter that it includes one of the lead characters in a position of Time Variance Agency authority, which she hasn’t yet attained here.

Ultimately, then, I really enjoyed this second series of Loki way more than the first and, though I’m sure it’s almost certain that Loki himself will return (in films for sure and maybe even a third series), this one doesn’t leave things on a cliff hanger… it has a definitive ending. Which is a bit unusual for modern Marvel I must say. And no episode here has any kind of post credits sequence attached to it… so I am grateful to latch onto those small mercies while I can.

Ronin

Masterless Masterclass

Ronin
USA/UK 1998 
Directed by John Frankenheimer 
United Artists Blu Ray Zone B

I haven’t revisited Ronin for years and so it was time for a Blu Ray upgrade of one of my all time favourite Frankenheimer films. John Frankenheimer will always be best remembered for some of the classic Hollywood films such as Seconds, Grand Prix and French Connection II but this one, made just four years before he died, is the one which I think is his most clever and compelling watch. 

The title of the film is a metaphor for a bunch of ex-secret service/military individuals who are brought together by Natascha McElhone’s Diedre... who you assume is working for the IRA, to steal (with deadly force) a case containing something which you never find out. Yeah, that’s right, the case is a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin and is unimportant in itself, other than it completely drives the action of the movie relentlessly forward. So, the team she puts in place is almost iconic... we have Robert DeNiro, Jean Reno, Sean Bean, Stellan Skarsgård and Skipp Sudduth. And they, almost, could all be the Ronin of the title... a term which, in ancient Japan, meant a masterless samurai who would often pick up jobs from various sources... apart from one character but, to reveal who that character is would be a spoiler. You don’t find out until the end anyway. 

And there is action, betrayal, unexpected deaths and one of, to my mind, the best car chases in cinema history (the second one of the two in this film). It moves along at a fair lick with the first half an hour setting up the characters and revealing all you need to know about them, as they plan their method of attack and then, of course, we have ‘the heist gone wrong’ trope which leads to all the shenanigans of the rest of the movie. That’s all I’m saying about the plot. 

The film is up there with The Quiller Memorandum almost (reviewed here), in terms of how clever the various characters are written and, I reckon a lot of that must be due to the uncredited script doctoring by David Mamet. So highlights in that regard would be the opening, where DeNiro hides a gun behind a cafe he is supposed to be meeting up in and then, making a point of going to the toilet so he can ensure the back door is open so he can get out if the going gets tough. By the way, that scene switches from the streets of France to a studio replica of the same cafe by use of a travelling matte shot which is, I think, impossible to spot unless you know it’s there (the old DVD version of this had a commentary track by Frankenheimer, revealing things like this). 

Other things of interest are DeNiro’s use of a cup of coffee to first deliberately spill to test the reflexes of Skarsgård’s character and, later, to ‘ambush’ Sean Bean’s character to prove a point to the people he’s working for. And there’s one scene where DeNiro is talking to an old colleague where they are using coded dialogue, pretending to be strangers, so DeNiro can get some information. It’s not until the end of the movie until you realise that the conversation was also deliberately ‘loose’ to an extent and serving as a kind of ‘double blind’ should any of his new colleagues be listening. 

Another interesting thing is that the film has three James Bond villains in it but, bizarrely, they never appear in any scene together. So we have Sean Bean who was the villain in Goldeneye (reviewed here), Jonathan Pryce who was the bad guy in Tomorrow Never Dies (reviewed here) and, in a wonderful scene following on from a really well done bullet removal sequence, Michael Lonsdale, who played the villain in Moonraker (reviewed here). Lonsdale has an especially important scene with DeNiro as he is working on a model of a scene from the famous story of The 47 Ronin, explaining things to DeNiro and pushing certain metaphors home. 

This is still one of the great ‘caper’ action movies by my book and I would love to see this in a cinema again because I remember it looked great on a big screen. And especially for how it sounds... the car chases are noisy and everything is really spot on and intense during certain scenes. Also... and I don’t see this in a lot of films, to be honest... there are a lot of civilians being killed or injured during the various shoot outs and car chases on the streets of whatever country the central characters happen to be in at the time. Not to mention the spectacular ice dance death fall of world champion ice skater Katarina Witt, as the inadvertent girlfriend of one of the bad guys of the movie. 

All this and a knock out score by Elia Cmiral which really serves the film well and is also a great listen as a stand alone CD. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about Ronin and, I’m surprised there aren’t a load of books written about this particular movie. I also wonder, since their chemistry is just so good in this, why DeNiro and Reno were not put in any more movies together... they both knock it out of the park here and play off each other really well. Definitely add this one to your hit list if you’ve never seen this marvellous gem before. 

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Dead Retconning

Spider-Man Brand New Day
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
USA/Canada/UK/Germany 2026
Columbia Studios
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: A whole webful of spoilers in this one. You were warned!

Well I was fully expecting Spider-Man: Brand New Day to be absolutely terrible but, instead, I found myself pleasantly surprised by this movie. If a little confused about the direction it takes. Or make that very confused. 

Okay, so all that stuff in Spider-Man: No Way Home where the whole world forgot who Peter Parker was, surely must have been to give Columbia Pictures, who wanted Spider-Man back for their own films, a brand new start and, presumably, to not have them have to pick up the cheques for certain regular actors in the current Spider-Man continuity but... nope. I suspect that was the idea when that film was released... to allow Columbia to sever all ties with the Disney owned Marvel but, I dunno, something must have happened. Maybe a studio or department head left or, heck, given the failure of most of their other Spider-Man spin offs such as Morbius (reviewed here), Madame Web (reviewed here) and Kraven The Hunter (reviewed here), perhaps they finally realised they can’t make a profitable Spider-Man movie without Marvel’s involvement. 

Good move because I’m already hearing this latest one is breaking all box office expectations and, the way this film plays out, it looks like Marvel and Columbia have made a truce and are ready to loan all their toys out to each other and let each other play in their backyards for a while. And from here on in I’m going into spoiler territory folks so... again... you were warned. 

So we have Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon back as Peter Parker, MJ and Ned Leeds respectively. And the long game on the story beats seems to be to somehow reset this small unit back to what it was in the MCU films. I mean, it doesn’t completely reset to the status quo but you can certainly see how it can only be a matter of time. 

And, also joining them from the Marvel Cinematic Universe are Florence Pugh as... well, I guess she’s Black Widow now, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk and Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle (aka The Punisher). However, here’s the big spoiler, people... making her MCU/Columbia character debut in this film we have Sadie Sink as... Jean Grey. Yup... Marvel Girl herself is in this after having previously been played by both Famke Janssen and Sophie Turner in a number of different X-Men films each. And not only that, she’s kind of set up as the main villain in this movie... two things wrong with that, as far as I’m concerned.

Firstly, the character is mostly portrayed as dark and damaged in exactly the same kind of way that Lewis Pullman’s character in Thunderbolts* was. Which means that it could be very easy for Marvel to... for the third time in the cinema and when they deem fit... do a more convincing version of the Dark Phoenix storyline. Which means, if they do that, another character which will very much be needed in the MCU’s new X-Men line up just made her debut here. 

Secondly, we all know that for many years (decades) before that storyline which has her become a danger and threat to the entire universe, resulting in her death (if memory serves, before the inevitable comic book style resurrection some time later), she was actually one of the good guys... er gals... as one of the original The Uncanny X-Men. So, yeah, once the audience realise who she is playing... well it’s then that most of them will surely realise that the villain is a huge red herring and that the real villain is, of course, Damage Control. Alas, once again in MCU continuity, this organisation is not being headed up by Tyne Daley as it was in Spider-Man: Homecoming (reviewed here). So yeah, bad things are afoot with Damage Control but, effectively, the main villainess of the movie is Jean Grey, as a kind of surrogate villain. 

But, it’s a nice film and has a good warm heart at its centre. Oh... and if people were upset by Spider-Man: No Way Home (reviewed here) in that it killed off Aunt May... well she’s still dead but Marisa Tomei is back to play out a flashback sequence which actually has a big impact to the resolution of the story arc here, actually. 

And there are some other politics at play too, I think. I don’t like where they’ve left Bruce Banner’s conclusion here and I am hoping they’ve put him in this place because it makes sense to have him there when needed a few years down the line. Probably a political move on the part of the two studios, I would think.

But, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a pretty good film, all told... having some heart breakingly good performances and completely destroying my expectations, I’m glad to say. They’ve even brought back composer Michael Giacchino to score it but, he does a strange thing here. I think the four years which have passed in loneliness for Peter Parker must be the reason why he’s adjusted the leitmotif for the character. He’s stripped his main, six note theme down to just four notes. simplifying it for the whole of the movie until, with certain resolutions down the line, he returns to the old six note theme in the end credits sequence. Nice.

As always with the Marvel movies this one has a post-credits sequence and, it’s non-commital enough to have an ending which tells you one specific thing without giving anything away. And that’s to show that Spider-Man has gone into space and is on another planet. Which could be a hint to the next stand alone movie or... well... it could mean that we’ll be seeing Tom Holland again in either Avengers: Doomsday this December or, more likely, Avengers: Secret Wars in December 2027. And that’s it. I was expecting Columbia to fumble the ball big time with the Spider-Man franchise but Spider-Man: Brand New Day really does deliver the goods (and is still a lot better than Spider-Man: Far From Home (reviewed here). ‘Nuff Said!

*No, sorry, that asterisk wasn’t for the reader, it’s just part of the title of the movie. Relax.

Zombiesaurus

D’ya think...?

Zombiesaurus
aka The Jurassic Dead 
aka Z-Rex - The Jurassic Dead
Directed by Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick
USA 2017
101 Films DVD Region 2

Wow. This is terrible.

In fact, the only thing I could think of that would be almost as bad as wasting my time sitting through this film is having to waste my time writing a review of it. 

And it’s going to be a short review, for sure (my apologies). 

Now I know a lot of people spend a lot of time and hard work making a movie but, sometimes something is so bad that you have to warn other people about it. I saw this a few years ago, going cheap in a nice, slipcased DVD (seriously, why did they bother?) and I knew it would be entertaining to some degree. I mean, with a name like Zombiesaurus... right?

How wrong I was. 

And how do you screw up a movie with a concept that includes a reanimated, dead dinosaur? Well, like this I guess. This isn’t, sad to say, some ironic ‘so bad it’s good’ concoction of a movie... this one is just generally bad and cheap looking and confusing (in terms of what the hell is going on with the script) and... yeah... it’s just all kinds of bad. 

The story... from what I could make out of it... involves a group of five commandos who infiltrate a terrorist’s top secret bunker because he has made a serum that brings dead things back to life. We know this because in one of the pre-credits scenes he tries it out on a stray dinosaur (yeah... obviously easy to find a dead dinosaur in real life, right?) and it reanimates. After he also reanimates a dead cat one year later, he is killed by a car but... he’s not really dead and, knowing some meteors will be hitting the earth soon, he decides to release his serum into the atmosphere sometime after this. So that’s why the five commandos are there. Um... okay.

And there are also four university students whose car breaks down in the middle of the desert due to an EMF pulse caused by the meteor. So they happen to accidentally stumble on the bunker at pretty much the same time and, then, it’s a race against time to stop the release of the serum into the atmosphere and... um... I think that’s more or less it. But believe me when I say that, not matter how good any of that may or may not sound... the story is a pretty confused mess which feels like it’s being re-written every ten minutes or so. 

And the execution of story... doesn’t include too much footage of the titular zombie dinosaur and everything looks so fake and cheap (including the man in a costume dinosaur... or perhaps it’s just a big puppet) with fake CGI blood (but really fake) and fake explosions superimposed over everything (like a 1980s video arcade game) and, the worst sin of all, totally unlikeable characters. None of whom seem to have any kind of redeeming quality. I mean, if you’re going to start killing these people off... at least attempt to have someone an audience cares about in jeopardy. I couldn’t wait for each next person to die because I thought, the fewer there are in this, the nearer I am to the end (and it’s not a long film to begin with). 

The only slight positive was that one of the characters, played by someone called Andy Haman, looks exactly like the video game character Duke Nukem and his name is Duque (pronounced Duke). This likeness is discussed in the movie and, really, it’s the only moment where it even scratches close to being entertaining. Even some of the acting feels pretty forced and fake. Not to mention the terrible score and... well... terrible everything else.

So that’s me done with Zombiesaurus... possibly one of the worst films I’ve ever had to suffer through. I mean, at one point I thought that maybe it was so bad because the writers were attempting to be ironic but, if that is the case (and I really don’t think it is) then it all fell flat anyway so... no. Just no. I wouldn’t come close to recommending this one to anybody at all. Watch something else, would be my advice. 

Diabolik - Who Are You?

Kant Even

Diabolik - Who Are You?
aka Diabolik: Chi sei?
Directed by the Marretti Brothers
Italy/France 2023
RAI Cinema

Warning: Mild spoilers.

Okay… so I’ve been waiting a very long time to see the third part of the modern Diabolik trilogy. When I was waiting for the third one to come out on Italian Blu Ray back in early 2024, Kino Lorber in America announced they had struck a deal to distribute the films in America. Oh no, I thought. I hope that doesn’t mean the Italians will not put an English subtitle track on that third one as part of this deal. And, yep, they didn’t. Which I thought was a total sell out and left a lot of people who had been watching them on the imported Italian Blu Rays (in nice special edition boxes far better than how they’ve been released as in America) up the creek somewhat. And then my mode of thinking ran to… assume Kino Lorber bottle it and don’t give these films the major cinema releases they deserve in both the US and the UK, then I bet they just release them as a single set and I’ll have to buy the first two again just to catch up to the third. And… yes, that’s indeed what’s happened. So now I have a not so good looking three pack of the films with very few extras and nothing like the facsimile comics, etc, which came with my Italian editions. So that’s all a bit rubbish.

And a shame too because, now I’ve finally caught up to Diabolik: Who Are You? It turns out it’s the best of the three modern films (although, of course, nowhere near as good as the one by Mario Bava, reviewed here). Giacomo Gianniotte returns for a second go at the title character (after replacing the actor from the first part of the trilogy in the last movie, both reviewed here and here) and the astonishingly beautiful Miriam Leone returns as her third go at Eva Kant (almost but not quite rivalling Marissa Mell in the Bava version). 

Also back for this third one we have the brilliant Valerio Mastandrea as Inspector Ginko and, continuing as his secret, upper class girlfriend Altea de Vallemberg, we have the incomparable Monica Bellucci. Plus Pier Giorgo Bellocchio as Sergeant Palmer. 

And it’s fantastic, making up for the sluggishness of the last one by opening with a projected heist through the titles, where we see everything go right and Diabolik uses a handy gadget on his car to raise the chassis above the level of some bollards blocking his getaway…. 

But then we get to see what really happens when the plan is set in motion, when a ruthless bunch of murderous armed criminals crash the heist and take everything for themselves. We then see Diabolik and Ginko trying to find the criminals, both independently tracking them back to their lair and simultaneously being captured by them and locked in a cell together. So it’s up to their two women-folk to pool their resources and stage a rescue before Ginko and Diabolik are killed. Which gives us time to hear a little of Ginko’s back story and to get a long series of monochrome flashback sequences telling Diabolik’s origins, with flashes of red to highlight things like rubies and spilled blood… swiping a page from the Sin City movies and comics perhaps?

I loved this one and, once again we see Diabolik’s ruthless streak, ferociously demonstrated in the flashbacks with Andrea Arru and Lorenzo Zurzolo playing younger versions of the feral character… and we learn how a stuffed, black panther comes into play on the origins of Diabolik’s name. 

There are a lot more split screen techniques of different kinds in this one and the Marreti’s seem to be pushing the envelope on just how comic book the movie gets at certain points... plus there’s some especially nice mise en scène featuring an Alfred Hitchcock style overhead shot near the start of the movie. 

Another highlight, for me, was the inclusion of some female nudity in a scene with a stripper. I’ve no idea why they put that in to limit the audience who could see it but it’s the first time in any Diabolik media, it turns out, that nudity has been allowed… which apparently allowed it to survive much longer than it’s more lurid, contemporary comic books of the time. Apparently Diabolik and Eva even sleep in separate beds in the comics… something which Mario Bava wisely ignored, for sure. It’s the chemistry between these two characters which make the movies worth watching, as far as I’m concerned. 

And that’s me done on Diabolik: Who Are You? A long time coming to an English friendly format but worth the wait, I reckon. The best of the new batch, for sure.

Captain Nemo And The Underwater City

Nemonomicon

Captain Nemo And 
The Underwater City
UK 1969 
Directed by James Hill
MGM Blu Ray Zone B (German)

Warning: Some spoilers just below the surface.

There’s a place I know where we can go, it’s such a lot to see,
It’s the fun food, the fun food factory.
Theme song from The Fun Food Factory

Okay... I assume I saw Captain Nemo And The Underwater City on television when I was a kid but there’s not much I remember about it, apart from the music. I wanted to give this one a watch while I was catching up and revisiting stories adapted and inspired by Jules Verne and, in the case of this one, ‘inspired by’ is a polite way of calling this one out in terms of having anything to do with the original source. 

I mean, you’ve got a white actor playing Captain Nemo, Hollywood veteran Robert Ryan and, he has a big submarine called Nautilus. And that’s about it in terms of this film having anything to do with Jules Verne, it’s sad to say. Although it would have been an entertaining, fun romp back in the day and, if you can divorce yourself from the perception of how a modern sci-fi action film should play, you may still have a good time with it now.

While, indeed, Nemo saves a bunch of people from drowning when their ship sinks at the start... unlike the original, he did not cause that sinking himself, he just comes to their dubious rescue and there’s no mention of the original character’s intent on destroying ocean vessels in this. Instead, although those rescued are still his prisoners, he takes them to his big undersea city where they can live a good life, if they so desire. The various rescued even have a small child and his kitten with them so, yeah, we’re definitely in a very different world than that created by Verne.

The main survivors are played by Chuck Connors, Bill Fraser (of Bootsie and Snudge fame), Kenneth Connor (who you’ve probably seen in the odd Carry On film from time to time), Allan Cuthbertson (who is set up as the human villain of the piece but dies already, half way through the movie) and also... Nanette Newman. Now I’ve not seen her in much stuff, it has to be said but I remember her as the host of a really annoying children’s TV programme in the mid 1970s called The Fun Food Factory. It’s a TV show that the IMDB barely registers the existence of, dating it as 1976 but listing it as having zero episodes and... perhaps it’s best this show and its annoying title song has officially vanished from the those seeking the stats.. although at least one episode can be found on YouTube (watch it at your peril is what I say). But I used to tune into it on occasion because I liked Nanette Newman and so it’s nice seeing her in a movie such as this. She has a good presence as the mother of the aforementioned sprog and it’s strongly hinted she will be Nemo’s romantic interest after the story of this one, such as it is, has played out. Alas, although she has good presence in the film, she doesn’t really have much to do and could have done with a better written part, to be honest. 

The other big female role in this, playing one of the community living under the sea and also acting as a love interest for Chuck Connors’ character, is the lovely Luciana Paluzzi... who was, of course, the sultry, sexy SPECTRE assassin who tried to kill James Bond before later taking a shot in the back she intended for him in Thunderball (reviewed here). She has a bit more to do here but... yeah, the film is not really big on building decent characters, I would say. 

Now this was made on a shoestring budget but, even so, the scope of the sets and the design of the production is mostly rather good (there’s even some beautiful Bavaesque lighting at one point). However, the fact that everything is made out of gold in the film is a bit of a problem because, although everything is painted with some kind of gold paint to make it seem expensive, the effect is to just make everything look a bit like it’s made out of cheap plastic. Which is a shame because the shot compositions and colours are pretty good. 

Apart from Captain Nemo’s diving suit, that is. 

This is black with big, glittery patterns on it and looks nothing less like a 1930s - 50s American western, decorative cowboy outfit. In the scenes where Ryan wears this stuff, he does look quite ridiculous, it’s sad to say. And, as it happens, the underwater farm sequence where Nemo is showing his ‘guests’ around the parts of the ocean which provide them all with food, looks more than competent but, honestly, slows the film down in pace and is a bit dull. 

One very good thing, though, is the score by Walter Stott (who later became Angela Morley and is billed like that on the FSM CD release from a few decades ago). That being said... an I’m not suggesting anything underhanded here... but the main theme sounds quite like the love theme that Jerry Goldsmith wrote for the 1984 movie Supergirl and the resemblance is so striking that I wonder if parts of this score turned up on the temp track for that movie, when Jerry was given the job (I guess I’ll never know, now). 

Other things of note is that Paluzzi plays something which is both similar and not at all like a theremin in one scene and, another note, a couple of people who ‘leave’ the city at the end of the picture should surely have decompression sickness when they reach the ocean’s surface. They come up way too quick. And the last note I have on this from when I was watching the movie is that Chuck Connors’ hair here is one of the most scary things you’ll see in this tale. I’m assuming it was a wig but, whatever it is, you certainly wouldn’t miss him and his aggressive locks walking down the street. 

And that’s me done here... Captain Nemo And The Underwater City is a pleasant film with not too much going for it to make it stand out in its own right and certainly nothing to do with the source material. If you like Nemo and The Nautilus then you might give it a look but, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to anyone. Incidentally, I had to pick this one up on a German Blu Ray disc because the film is not available in the UK or US, alas. It’s completely English friendly and has the original UK language track on it but, if you are hard of hearing, know that it doesn’t have a subtitle track on it. 

Mysterious Island

Minding Nemo

Mysterious Island
UK 1961
Directed by Cy Endfield
Columbia/Impact Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: All the mysterious spoilers on this one.

So Mysterious Island is based on the novel of a similar name... my favourite of Jules Verne’s novels, The Mysterious Island. I first heard of it by reading a Marvel Classics comic when I was a youngster and was fascinated by it, especially the twist towards the end. It was long before I caught up with this version on television (I guess I would have watched it in on a black and white set in the 1970s) and I like to revisit this movie in particular every now and again for a few reasons. One is that it’s easily the most entertaining production of this ‘adaptation’. Two is that it’s got an absolutely fantastic, somewhat blistering, driven score by Bernard Herrmann and thirdly, because the last adaptation of this I saw, as a Columbia serial, also heavily featured the queen of an alien race and her cohorts wearing left over costumes from serials like Flash Gordon (reviewed here) and Buck Rogers (reviewed here), chasing the various protagonists around said island for a lot of the running time and, frankly, that’s about as far from the book as you could get.

That being said, this is in many ways just as bad in terms of taking huge liberties with the original text and, truth be told, I’ve never myself seen a straight version of this done properly. The obvious differences here being: Well, there are no women in the book that I can recall but, in this one, two female characters are inexplicably washed up on the beach to join the main characters in a random shipwreck. This seems to happen a lot with adaptations of Jules Verne’s works, I’ve noticed, since they rarely have any major female characters and, for some reason, movie studios insist on putting them in anyway. So they completely screw themselves in the ‘accurate adaptation’ department before they’ve even started. Secondly... there’s no pet dog in this and the four legged character is sorely missed, in my opinion. 

Thirdly, well... it’s a Schneer and Harryhausen production and Ray needs something to animate so, the ‘mysterious’ benefactor of the island (I’ll get to him in a minute) is working on solving mankind’s hunger problems by having figured out how to make crops and animals grow to huge size (the science here is not elabourated on). So we have a giant crab, giant turkey-like bird, giant bee and giant octopus for some of the characters to fight here. Interestingly for a film utilising the genius of Ray Harryhausen, the crab used is a real crab, gutted and with armatures fitted inside it, rather than a rubber model. 

Okay, so the film starts off strongly with Herrmann’s powerful score crashing in over the Columbia logo before his music gets full on broody as the various credits rise against a moving backdrop of the sea (and you can hear it behind the music too), the various shots of the sea tinted yellow, then purple, then blue and then back to yellow again... constantly cycling between various colours as the credits are raised. And it’s during these credits that we have the films first big clunker of a mistake. A total spoiler... I’ll get back to it in a second.

The plot is about five prisoners (actually, four union army prisoners and one confederate captor) escaping gaol during the siege of Richmond, Virginia in 1865. They take a hot air balloon but circumstances are such that they wash up on a deserted island and have to survive. Strange things... no, mysterious things... happen to them. The captain is washed up separately and unconscious but a fire has been lit where he can be found by the others. Some vine creepers are left by the entrance to two caves in a cliff wall, allowing access. The giant turkey thing is shot from afar, saving the lives of some of the crew. A chest of useful implements such as rifles, ammunition, a compass, charts, a sextant, tools, pots n’ pans, a telescope and a copy of Robinson Crusoe conveniently washes up on shore at a convenient point. And a pirate ship which places the lives of the escaped survivors in peril is mysteriously blown up from beneath with an explosive charge. The whole mystery of the original book comes from trying to figure out who the survivors’ mysterious benefactor is. And it’s wonderful... at least in the book.

But let’s go back to those opening credits because, this is where things get silly. There’s a huge spoiler in them because, instead of just listing Herbert Lom as being among the cast, the studio decide to list the credit thusly: “Herbert Lom as Captain Nemo”. Yeah, so that blows, right out of the water, the mystery of the helping hand being Captain Nemo and the surviving remnant of the Nautilus submarine from the earlier Jules Verne adventure yarn 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (Columbia wanted James Mason from the 1950s version to play Nemo again here but, alas, that didn’t happen). 

Luckily, Lom, along with all the other principal actors consisting of Michael Craig, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill, Beth Logan, Percy Herbert and Dan Jackson... are all brilliant in this and, even though the twist is revealed on that opening credit, the film is hugely watchable and entertaining without being forewarned. Although, just to compound their error, in this version, it’s revealed the rifles in the chest are engraved with the word Nautilus... just in case we forgot the whole “it’s Captain Nemo folks’ vibe of the, well, not so Mysterious now Island. 

There’s still a little suspense left though, as Nemo warns his new companions that the volcano on the island is due to destroy it in two days or less. Can they all work together to find a way off the island before they are burned to a cinder? You can probably guess which characters survive and which one doesn’t, I suspect. 

And that’s me done with Mysterious Island for a while. Always a pleasure to watch this one and, although there’s not a huge amount of Harryhausen’s trademark animation in it, it’s still a greatly entertaining movie, even if they do go out of their way to advertise the twist in both their credits and, preposterously, on the original cinema trailers for the film too. I’m glad that, when I was a lot younger than I am now, Marvel Comics at least didn’t advertise the twist ahead of schedule. Still, if you’re going to see a cinematic version of Mysterious Island, this is certainly among the more fun ones, even if it continues the tradition of being completely inaccurate to the original novel.

20,000 Leagues Under Sea (1954)

Nemotherapy

20,000 Leagues Under Sea
Directed by Richard Fleischer
USA 1954
Disney DVD Region 2

Much as I would have liked to watch this 1954 Disney version of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea on a nice Blu Ray transfer, I was unable to afford the frankly extortionate cost (plus club membership fee for the privilege) that Disney charge for their Blu Ray of this one (around the area of treble figures is not my thing). So I just picked up their old DVD for a fiver, thanks very much!

Now, I know I must have seen this at least once as a kid on television (possibly not in colour) but there’s not a great deal I remembered about it, to be honest… so it was like discovering this film all over again, this time around. It’s got a great cast too… although, as usual, there are elements, about the casting even, that are at odds with Jules Verne’s original novel. And by that I mean we have the great James Mason playing Nemo himself so… as you can see, not an Indian with a turban etc as I seem to remember him appearing in the novel (something the 1916 version, which I reviewed here kinda got right… but not without its own problems). That being said, the trade off is worth it as he embodies Nemo, who is often depicted as more an enigma than a real person, with great depth and soul and you can see the struggle of his torment as Professor Aronnax (played by Paul Lukas), one of his prisoners/guest on the Nautilus, challenges his ideas and motives. 

Two other big names also join the cast, with Kirk Douglas performing the rebellious and often comic relief spirit of harpooner Ned Land. And not to forget Aronnax’ life long assistant Conseil, played here by the mighty Peter Lorre himself. I mean, Lorre is always fantastic to watch but the chemistry he has with Kirk Douglas here is off the charts. 

The real stars of this movie, though, are the wonderful sets and designs. I mean, everything looks so big. Even the small hotel room Arronax and Conseil are sharing at the start of the adventure looks so large and ornate it’s like a palace. And that’s before we even get to the Nautilus submarine, which is itself a nice ornate design (not much like the plain one in the original novel, to be fair) and the interiors are equally large and colourfully lit. Indeed, it’s a big, bright, colourful film (even on this DVD transfer) and it must have cost Disney a lot of money to produce this.

And, as I mentioned in my review of the 1916 version of the tale (which is nowhere near as aligned to the original novel as this one), Disney went to the same location in the Bahamas to do all of the underwater photography scenes. But here, of course, they’re writ large in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, in colour and look equally fantastic. This one must look great in a cinema.

And the effects look wonderful too. Even the giant squid attack towards the end of the movie looks great. Now, I know they had to reshoot it because it didn’t look so fantastic in the daylight so they reshot the fight with the squid in a rainy, night time storm setting but, honestly, for a practical effect this one looks way more convincing than CGI could have done. I was totally sold on it… which I wasn’t expecting. 

So... great colours, great performances, a cute seal and some very grand music makes 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, in this iteration, a big winner. And, to boot, there’s that thing about Jules Verne never seeming to have female characters who are in with the main antagonists. Well, I was wondering who the leading lady would be that they would add in the story and… woah… there isn’t one. They did it straight to the book on that account. That being said, when Kirk Douglas enters the picture he has a woman on each arm so… maybe the producers were trying to compensate for the lack of female presence for the rest of the movie. Personally I think all films should have lots of cool women in them but… when it comes to adaptation then maybe follow the source would be my motto.

And that’s me done with the 1954 version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea… Mason’s performance as the Captain is the one to measure others by (in all but ethnicity), even if he continually decides to play exactly what you’re expecting him to on that big organ of his (yeah… it’s Bach’s Toccata And Fugue In D Minor again people!). Disney would, of course, partially remake this film in the late 1970s as The Black Hole… and you can read my review of that one here.

20,000 Leagues Under Sea (1916)

Little Slumber 
In Nemo Land

20,000 Leagues Under Sea
Directed by Stuart Paton
USA 1916
Imprint Blu Ray A/B/C

Warning: Some slight spoilers here. 

I’ve been wanting to see this silent version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea for some time now, since I loved the original novel by one of my favourite authors, Jules Verne. I didn’t get the UK release of this because it was bundled in with a bunch of movies I wasn’t that interested in but, I’m glad I waited now because this Australian edition is part of their Tales Of Adventure Collection 8, with some other Verne movies and some slightly adjacent tales in its make-up.

Now, I was both impressed and disappointed in this in equal parts so, I’m not quite sure how to organise this review... 

Okay, the first thing I was impressed with was that, unlike 99.5% of the Captain Nemo films I’ve seen in film versions, they actually get the character’s ethnicity correct to the book.. so an Indian, turban wearing guy (I think they actually got it right in the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen too but, that movie was also an incredibly poor adaptation of its source material). That being said, the caveat here is that he’s portrayed by a white dude, Allen Holubar, in brown face. Swings and roundabouts I guess, people. 

Another impressive thing is the Williamson brothers and their invention. Highlighted in footage before the film gets properly underway, along with a photo of Jules Verne, the Williamsons went with the director on location (the same locations used for the Disney version a few decades later) because they'd invented cameras for underwater photography. So there are lots of shots of divers and fish and coral etc in the movie. I can’t imagine what this might have looked like to the inhabitants of the world at the time, many of whom would never had been able to see what this stuff properly looks like before this motion picture was released. So it’s a landmark film for inventing and demonstrating the world’s first underwater photography, if for nothing else.

However, there are some problems I had with the film. 

Asides from lots of almost superfluous women in the movie… Verne didn’t really do much in the way of meaningful female characters, certainly in his most famous books… the story is an absolute mess and Jules would have been scientifically rotating in his grave at such shenanigans (and don’t get me started on the 50s serial of Mysterious Island, with its alien queen hell bent on world conquest, either). What we have here is very little to do with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea after about the first 10 mins… it’s also taking portions from The Mysterious Island (probably my favourite Jules Verne novel) and then grafted onto it another story featuring a.. ‘child of nature’ as she is credited in the cast list (a euphemism for someone who’s ‘gone native’)… who, most viewers will twig, long before the end of the picture and the big reveal, turns out to be Captain Nemo’s long lost daughter. 

About her... one of the crew of the balloon that lands on the island finds her and, she’s played by a lady called Jane Gail, again in brown face make up. And all I will say about her is… she’s an absolute comic genius. The scene where the poor white guy is trying to show her how to put on a shirt and trousers... and she’s waggling her toes at him… had me in stitches. I need to see more things with this lady in because she tickled my funny bone somewhat. She was the truly bright spot of this film for me, for sure (she died on her 74th birthday, I’m informed). 

Things all come around and she is reunited with her father who dies, is buried at sea and then we also see the Nautilus submarine (which appears to be quite different in long shot as opposed to when it surfaces, it seems to me) sink beneath the waves one final time. Leaving us with a romantic entailment involving one of the crew of the original balloon and Jane Gail’s character. Which also leaves me with the question… was this the first time an interracial romance had been depicted on screen or were there earlier films?

And that’s me done with this iteration of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, I think. It was a pleasure to watch this version, despite the enormous liberties taken with the original source materials… I’d certainly recommend this one to lovers of silent movies and will probably watch this one again at some point (if only for the comical shenanigans of Jane Gail). I’m pleased I finally got to see this one. 

In Like Flint

 

Acting On Inflint

In Like Flint
20th Century Fox 1967
Directed by Gordon Douglas
French Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Light spoilers.

You have eyes that keep attracting me,
Dazzling and distracting me,
It’s your Zowie face.
You have a smile, this is disarming,
And style that is alarming,
And such a wowie face.
From Nelson RIddle’s lyrics to the greatest song in movie history, Jerry Goldsmith’s In Like Flint theme.


After the incredible success of Bond spoof/parody Our Man Flint the previous year (reviewed here), in fact, even before that film’s release it would seem, a sequel called In Like Flint was enthusiastically commissioned. It would appear however, according to lead actor James Coburn who played Derek Flint, that the filmmakers, including the director, were not that interested in the film they were making. Coburn has gone on record that it was himself and the stunt choreographer who directed a lot of the finished film between them. Not sure I totally believe that (and I may be prejudiced because I think Douglas has made some good movies) but there may be some truth in that, from a certain point of view, I would guess.

Either way, the lack of backing from the production team doesn’t really come across in the final product, which is another breezy and fun spy movie parody in the vein of the first film. Coburn is back and so is Lee J. Cobb as former boss Lloyd Cramden. After the president is switched under his nose using a special paralysing gas, Cramden is left with the mystery of why the president’s golf swing, which he was timing with his stop watch, took three minutes but only passed in a half a second from his point of view. And then, after a run in with one of the film’s main, soft antagonists played by Jean Hale, Cramden is discredited and suspended from his organisation. Flint believes the problem is coming from within ZOWIE (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage) itself and, he’s half right. The real problem is a network of women operating out of a chain of beauty parlours called Fabulous Face... they want to take control of the world and deliver it into the safer hands of women (and who can blame them), something Flint mocks openly when discovering the truth. Despite acknowledging that the real power in the world is really in the hands of secretaries and mistresses. 

And, yes, the women have been guilty of infiltrating various organisations and causing untold damage but, also, slowly brainwashing women to their ways of thinking and diminishing faith in men via thousands of subliminally loaded hairdryers in various salons around the world. However, when the men they’ve been working with in ZOWIE take the operation from their hands, the last quarter of the movie becomes about the ladies and Flint working together to stop the turncoats’ mad plan to dominate or destroy the world (or something). 

And it’s a great film, which always lands differently every time I revisit it. When I was a kid I always preferred this one slightly more than the excellent original but I’ve flip flopped on that as I’ve got older. In Like Flint is fantastic but, I think it’s just a little less ingenious than the first one. However there’s still a lot to recommend in this and much that’s worthy of note. 

Like actress Yvonne Craig, who plays a scene or two as Natasha the ballerina. Of course, this actress was ballet trained herself so is perfect in this role and that training must have helped her out considerably when she was playing her regular spot as Batgirl opposite Adam West and Burt Ward on the third series of the Batman TV show that same year. Genre fans will also know her for little roles in a couple of The Man From UNCLE episodes (and one of the film ‘assemblies’) and from a role in the third and final season of Star Trek, a couple of years later. 

Then there’s all the silly Flintisms and gadgets which pop up. It’s curious because recurring gags like the pulse arm watch to restart Flint’s heart are used without explaining them to the audience this time around and absolutely require knowledge of the first film. However, unlike the first one, where Flint’s arsenal of sleuthing props make their debut on use, mostly, this one goes for a more formulaic introduction of setting up things to bring them back in a deus ex machina capacity later in the film. 

For instance, the wonderfully comic scene where Flint is talking to a dolphin in his pool so he can compile a human/dolphin dictionary, has an absurd pay off later in he film when Flint calls out to any passing dolphins in their own language, to hitch a ride under the security barbed wire on the Fabulous Face beauty resort in the Virgin Islands. The people at the resort have Flint’s three women held hostage in cryogenic suspension. The point is made that they’re all new women, Flint having found his former four aides husbands to marry, earlier in the film. When Cramden asks why there are only three now, Flint replies that he’s ‘cutting down’. 

Another item is the sonic gizmo which Flint shows Cramden at the start of the film, when Cramden calls on Flint for help. This device which doubles as Flint’s belt buckle emits a variety of sonic notes which can either push objects around, like a billiard ball or, if turned up, cause an object to burst apart. Flint uses this device at least twice in the second half of the movie, both to break the glass in the suspended animation chamber in which he is being frozen and also to push himself through space towards the ship containing lady cosmonauts at the film’s conclusion. 

Other moments of fun are less advertised ahead of schedule... such as when Flint poses as the man on the ZOWIE recruitment poster to hide himself in plain sight via a ‘trompe l'oeil’ effect... or the moment when he starts a plane full of Russians he is hastily leaving, to singing a Russian song. Remember those films where the lyrics would pop up on screen and a bouncing ball would stress the word you were supposed to be singing to join in? Well, the Russian letters to the song pop up here with a bouncing red star. So, yeah, you get the idea, the film is still as silly and as entertaining as the previous Flint adventure. 

Once again, Jerry Goldsmith provides scoring duties and, if you think the score to Our Man Flint was one of the greatest film scores of all time (and if you didn’t then you’re not listening right), In Like Flint has a somehow vastly superior score to the original. Not only that but it also has the greatest song in cinematic movie history, some of the lyrics of which are reproduced at the opening of this review. If you want great music, In Like Flint is the movie to go for in soundtrack excellence.

And that just about wraps me up for In Like Flint and the Flint movies in general. In 1976 there was a TV pilot film for a series that never got made called Our Man Flint - Dead On Target, with a different actor and... it completely misses the point of what Flint is all about, even playing the character relatively poe faced and no longer the superman of the movies, relegated to kind of running a private detective agency. It’s truly dreadful and if you really want to see it, at least one DVD incarnation of the movies included it as an extra. I’d not bother though, if I were you. Meanwhile, the first two Flint cinema movies are still an absolute joy to watch and I shall certainly try to keep revisiting them regularly over the years. Trivia hounds might like to note that this is the last film that 20th Century Fox shot in actual Cinemascope. Highly recommended.

She Dies Tomorrow

Some Time To Die

She Dies Tomorrow
USA 2020
Directed by Amy Seimetz
Blue Finch Films

Warning: This film has been called spoiler proof by angry reviewers, it seems to me but, I think it’s fair to say this review has light spoilers.

Okay, I’ll say up front that I have mixed feelings about She Dies Tomorrow. I sought it out on a recommendation from someone and so it does have its fans but, it seems there’s a heck of a lot of negative criticism for this film too and I can kinda see why. That being said there’s very little in the film not to like, except for the lack of clarity on the central premise... but it’s a great hook.

We start off with a character called Amy (played by Kate Lyn Sheil from the great Brigsby Bear, reviewed here). Clearly something is wrong with her and then we flash to someone who we later find out was in a relationship with her... he is in a room and starts going mad thinking he’s going to die tomorrow. Then Amy wakes up from a nightmare and returns to her empty house. She rings a friend because she’s anxious... she keeps stopping and starting as a realisation hits her every now and again. At some point the title of the movie is suddenly flashed on the screen for two seconds, blaring music like a jump scare... and then we continue to watch Amy slowly becoming disjointed from reality. Is a sequence showing blood cells interacting, a hint that she has a virus? She starts exploring textures with her sense of touch and looking at things... caressing flat surfaces as something which sounded a bit like Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (it’s probably not but that’s what it reminded me of) plays over and over on her vinyl record turntable. 

Her friend Jane (played by Jane Adams) comes and Amy tells her the thing which has been bothering her. She knows for a fact that she is going to die tomorrow... or at least she believes she will. Jane thinks she is having an alcoholic relapse (which technically she also is because, she’s drinking like there’s no tomorrow... because she believes that’s the case) and goes off. However, when we follow Jane home, she also gets the same idea that she, herself, is going to die tomorrow.

While Amy checks out the best cremation urns on the internet and decides she wants to be turned into a leather jacket after she dies, we follow the ‘also coming unhinged’ as she crashes her brother’s wife’s small birthday party... and tells them she’s going to die. Not long after she leaves them, the four people there also believe they will die the next day. 

And so it goes as we follow, primarily, Amy and Jane (and a few others but to a lesser degree) as they go about the evening contemplating their existence and getting into encounters with people they also infect with.... I dunno... an idea. 

At some point, the flashbacks from Amy’s very recent past, which eventually dovetails back into the start of the movie, show us how she came to be ‘infected’ but doesn’t show how the chain starts and, I’m sad to say, doesn’t clue us in to what’s happening. Now, that might have been okay... like a good zombie movie, the cause of the effect is rarely discussed but, in this case, there’s no actual pay off either and I think that’s why people may be having a problem with it (at least, some of the appalling reviews I’ve read). I also normally don’t mind when a movie doesn’t have a traditional closure moment but, frankly, with a mystery concept and leaving us with no idea if any of the people in this do, actually, die tomorrow... it feels a little off.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the fact that this film is basically taking an idea... if you think about it, it’s very much an M. R. James pass the curse story variation on Casting The Runes, found in such as movies like Ringu, Drag Me To Hell and It Follows (except there’s no getting rid of it so it’s a little more like a virus in some ways)... and then exploring the responses and reactions of the people who have been hit by this growing pandemic of certainty that they are going to meet their own demise the next day. And, yeah, I do appreciate the emotional areas into which this film strays and the way in which it explores humanity’s reaction to the prospect of its near demise... but the hook could have had just a little more back up to it, I felt. 

That being said, the director has an eye for interesting visuals. So some nice shot compositions where, for instance, Amy is framed by an upright rectangle formed by an alcove-like space into another room. And she certainly demonstrates that she’s into textures as much as her namesake protagonist, sometimes using big, vertical solid blocks to split the frame. And there’s also a lot of bright, flashing colour in certain sequences too... during episodes when the ‘victims’ lives are invaded by sudden spurts of enveloping lighting like they just strayed into a David Lynch nightmare and then are suddenly hit by distorted, indecipherable voices in the background (we know from one character that she’s hearing the voices of people long dead in her life)... so, yeah, visually the film is an absolute treat.

And so is the acting. Everyone is great in this and it feels like one of those films where certain things might have been left unscripted and worked on with the actors to build up their characters and scenes. Possibly not but, if this was strictly following the script then that would be a surprise to me, for sure. I suspect there was a lot of improvisation on the film.

So... I got a lot out of the film for sure but Tomorrow She Dies is not something I would recommend to many people (if any) because it sets up and executes such an intriguing prospect... I even thought we were heading into Philip K. Dick ‘reality is not what it seems’ territory at one point... but fails to deliver any hint or clue as to what is really going on. Like the ground zero moment for this ‘infection’ and I get the feeling that this concept must have been explored by the writer but then maybe just deliberately pared back for the audience and it just didn’t quite make it for me. It felt just a little bit thrown away and so, while I appreciated the way the concept was explored and the ideas it threw up as a consequence, I don’t think this is one I’d watch again.

The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver

Lemuel Pegging

The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver
USA 1960
Directed by Jack Sher
Morningside Productions/
Impact Blu Ray Zone 2

Warning: Both small... then large spoilers.

I have to say that, every time I revisit The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver, I find myself wondering how much time Ray Harryhausen actually spent with this film. From what I can make out, it’s surely only the squirrel and crocodile sequences in the second half of the movie which he was needed for? I guess the process of using a travelling matte to make people appear on the same frame at different sizes would have kept him busy but, as far as the stop motion animation side of things go... I think those two scenes were basically it. 

The film is based, of course, on Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels aka Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships which was written in 1726... but the film is set in 1699, starting off in Wapping in England. One can only assume, since most of the worlds and peoples that Gulliver (played here by Kerwin Mathews) meets in his travels in the book are completely absent from this movie (and from many other adaptations, it has to be said), that Wapping, England itself is counted as one of the three worlds because, like many, this motion picture only deals with Gulliver’s time in Lilliput where he is a giant and is even pegged down on the beach (as in the classic imagery usually used to illustrate the tale in various manifestations) and his time in Brobdingnag, where the tables are turned and both he and his fiance Elisabeth (played by June Thorburn) are tiny compared to this land of the giants. Luckily, they have the help of a young girl in the second segment called Glumdalclitch (played by Sherry Alberoni... for some reason, the name Glumdalclitch always makes me think of the treasure buried in a woman’s ‘lady garden’ so it always makes me smile, at least).     

I won’t go too much into the plot because there isn’t much of one other than, in Lilliput, Gulliver attempts to stop a war and in Brobdingnag he tries to not die from being put under suspicion of being a witch by a magician who hates him. Some of the biting satire has managed to survive though, such as the war between the Lilliputians and their enemies being about which end of an egg you should smash to eat it from, the small end or the big end. Yeah, that sounds about as silly a reason for war as pretty much all wars started in the world, it seems to me. So... no reason at all. Also, a remark by the king of Lilliput that he hates justice but loves the law, certainly rings true of a lot of people in positions of authority these days, for sure. 

The film is... a pleasant enough watch. Kerwin Mathews is much less a block of wood than in his previous movie for Schneer and Harryhausen, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here) and, while not ground shaking, the effects hold up far better on this nice new (at time of writing) Blu Ray edition from Impact than I’d expected and it passes the time nicely. 

That being said, there are a few issues with some of the execution and logic of things which seem a bit less thought out than they could be. For instance, to help the Lilliputions when a rainstorm comes, Gulliver blows the clouds out of the way. Um... yeah, the clouds would still be normal size and a person really can’t be doing that, even if he is a giant, I suspect. Another example would be when Gulliver goes fishing with his hat. We see a shot of the hat full of fish but, alas, when he empties it onto the beach for his tiny acquaintances, the scale of the fishes has changed to what would almost be normal size to them. Don’t get me wrong... modern CGI effects are no better (Spider-Man often seems to change size swinging from shot to shot in various films, for instance) but it seems to me a little more thought might have gone into issues like this.

That being said, it’s a nice and colourful film and the one thing which always brings me back to it is the absolutely astonishing score by Bernard Herrmann. It’s one of his more unusual ones where he’s trying to sound more English (it seems to me) and although there are some key Herrmann moments where he uses his characteristic repeat cells, it’s a much fuller and melodic sounding score and not one the unwary listener might, at first, peg as being from the same compositional mind that gave us, in the very same year, the ‘strings only’ score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

And that’s me about done on The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver I think... I really don’t have too much to say about the movie and the ending, where Gulliver and Elizabeth are washed up on a beach and waxing poetic, isn’t exactly stunning either. It’s mostly about the music and the various character actors involved for me (keep and eagle eye out for the woman who gives Dr. Gulliver a chicken as payment at the start of the film, it’s a youngish Joan Hickson, who would go on to play Miss Marple on TV, some 24 years later). If you like films of this period with a nice cast, an okay script and some wonderful scoring, then certainly give it a go. As far as Harryhausen goes though... it’s not exactly his strongest.